Often times, when new products are being designed, a material having certain properties is desired, but it may not be readily apparent which material best meets those properties. Therefore, experimentation may be required to find such a material. Such experimentation may be a time consuming and expensive endeavor, thereby making experimentation undue and unfeasible in many instances.
Current systems and methods for finding materials that possess desired properties only result in unorganized lists of materials having properties that are somewhere in the vicinity of the desired properties. Someone then has to sort through this list of materials and decide which material(s) most closely matches the desired properties. Often times, this may be done in an engineer's head, or the decision may be based on instinct, knowledge and experience or other unscientific means. As such, further testing or experimentation is often required to find out which of the materials actually best matches the desired properties overall. This is further complicated by the fact that a material may very closely match one or more desired property values, while not very closely matching other desired property values at all. Therefore, it is often difficult to tell which material(s) in the list will best match the desired properties overall.
There is presently no quick and easy way to find a material that best matches the desired properties overall. Thus, there is a need for systems and methods that allow one to quickly identify which existing material(s) most closely matches the desired properties overall, thereby allowing product development cycle times to be significantly reduced. There is also a need for such systems and methods to be automated using a computer. There is yet a further need for such systems and methods to be accessible to users via the Internet. There is also a need for such systems and methods to take all the desired properties into account collectively when calculating which material(s) best matches the desired properties overall. There is still a further need for such systems and methods to utilize fuzzy membership functions to score existing materials according to how well they match each individual desired property value. There is also a need for such systems and methods to allow properties having higher priorities to be given greater weight than properties having lower priorities when the overall match of the material is being calculated. Finally, there is a need for such systems and methods to allow materials to be ranked in descending order according to their calculated overall match, so that the material(s) that best matches the desired properties is readily identifiable by a user.